Guild Wars 2

Hi
Since in GW2 you can pretty much use a variety of classes for PvP by just leveling them to lvl 2 and using them in Mist I wanted to ask some questions about PvE.

I wanted to know which would be the most effective and rewarding PvE class in the game?
By that I mean being able to take down veteran mobs, bosses and be able to be a real help in dungeons and groups. Also to be able to be an effective asset to your team and guild.
I would like a class that is rewarding to play in terms or PvE.

Can anybody help me out?

Since

Guardian if you want to be effective solo/groups for little effort. Bad range, but your simple existance can be turned into a constant group buff.

Warrior can also be an awesome support/solo character, but guardian has more built in team utility and control options, while warrior has more damage and durability naturally. Really, it’s a toss up between them if you want the most output for your input.

Opposite that, though no less effective is probably mesmer and necromancer. Both require alot of effort, but bring alot to the table that other classes don’t.

hmm im torn between guardian or warrior.
Anybody else have any insight?
Thanks

Guardian with a big hammer.

Alright, break down for them.

Warrior gives far more offensive buffs, though can also make a great condition cleanser. It also packs alot of power, but isn’t as able to fully use it. Hard stuns are their CC of choice.

Guardian is far more defensive. They’re quite capable of self condition cleansing, and have a super-shout that pulls ALL allied conditions to them, and regardless of if it pulls them in, gives them every buff in the book. Their CC of choice is a collection of pulls and knockdown fields, focusing HEAVILY on controlling space.

A warrior can kill groups faster with moves like 100 blades, and various AoE’s. Generally, they have more effective AoE damage, though less lingering, and more immediate.

Guardians kill a bit slower, with a greater AoE focus on lingering fields, but have the tools to keep enemies in these fields.

Warriors transition very well to distance combat, with some immensly powerful ranged attacks.

Guardians lack in ranged combat, but have all kinds of unique tools to survive in melee, ranging from self heal on auto attacks, to mobility skills like the odd teleport.

Warriors tend to self combo only with fire fields. This leads to burning damage in all cases

Guardians tend to self combo only with light fields. this leads to retaliation, and iirc, condition removal.

If you want a ranged/melee capable offense specialist with a array of options to help the group fight at its fullest, go Warrior.

If you want a melee zone control specialist with an array of options to keep allies fighting constantly, go guardian.

Also, Guardian/warrior have amazing melee synergy together. If both go Hammer/Greatsword, they can play off eachother fully, leading to insane damage.

There is not a big difference between the Guardian and the Warrior, both professions are way superior to all the others in most aspects of the game. The Guardian offers more support and some unique abilities, the Warrior does more dps and has larger base HP pool.

nachtnebel.9168:

There is not a big difference between the Guardian and the Warrior, both professions are way superior to all the others in most aspects of the game. The Guardian offers more support and some unique abilities, the Warrior does more dps and has larger base HP pool.

There’s actually alot of difference in how they handle a situation.

Warriors lack the ability to force enemies to be in specific places at specific times. Guardians lack the hard stuns to keep an enemy from fighting back for long enough to put them down.

Warriors can easily open and poke from a distance. Guardians are nearly required to get in close to do good damage.

Warriors rely heavily on passive mitigation from their massive health/armor pools. Guardians rely more on active mitigation spaced out so their natural regen and cooldowns are getting proper use.

Not really answering your question but here’s my experience… I’m about to ditch my lvl 77 thief, leveled all in PvE, because I’m a new GW Lore nut that just realized I should have been a Charr Warrior in a Warband. To actually get on topic, AnemoneMeer’s post is dead on.

which one would be a more tankier class in dungeons?

From my experience, Guardian then Warrior. I have lvl 80 of both, as well as Thief, Engineer and Mesmer and have found that almost anything I do in PvE is loads easier on the Guard/War.

effective means to just simple do the job, then the answer is all of em.

probably the word you were looking for was efficiently.

LATVIAN.7853:

which one would be a more tankier class in dungeons?

Honestly, it’s impossible to say.

Warriors can easily pack four heals into their ten skill slots if they spec for a shout build, 3 of those heals being AoE, and then add naturally top of the line health and armor to the mix, and they can generally take insane amounts of abuse before actually going down. They’re going to take hits, but they don’t really need more than their dodge rolls to stay up

Guardians on the other hand have a massive array of defensive cooldowns and options that leads to them, in good hands, rarely even taking hits. And passive regen to help crawl back from those that do get through. They can’t take a punch half as well, but they take punches less than half as often.

It’s a tie and comes down to playstyle. In PvP though, guardians are tankier as they can easily put all the enemies skills on cooldown before they start taking significant hits, which shuts down many classes.

ye im also wondering about pvp because i heard in pvp guardians are very useful especially in WvWvW

LATVIAN.7853:

ye im also wondering about pvp because i heard in pvp guardians are very useful especially in WvWvW

Warriors can basically give 100% swiftness uptime and quite a few heals via shouts.

Or just, you know, gut people. Also alot of stuns as I said.

While guardians can keep people from retreating into safe havens with their space control abilities. Ring of Warding + Null field from a mesmer + line of warding after can generally keep anyone who tries to leave the fortress unable to return.

so which class would you recommend overall since you have quite alot of experiance from what i can see

LATVIAN.7853:

so which class would you recommend overall since you have quite alot of experiance from what i can see

I honestly can’t.

I don’t play either. I just dungeon with two masterful players, one a warrior, one a guardian, and both of them are pretty much equally awesome, in different ways.

It all comes down to how you play.

- Guardian zone locking skills don’t work on champions.

- Save yourself! Draws all conditions to the guardian, but only grants every boon to the guardian, not party members. Or if it does, it doesn’t show on your UI.

Guardian support actually isn’t any better than other classes. The party heals on a short cooldown tend to either just be the regen boon, or very small value. The good ones tend to either be attached to traits or on a long cooldown.

hmm
so warriors have the potential to kill alot faster while being abl to heal themselves too.
Guardians can absorb alot of damage but dont have that much dps

Well ill try make my decision thanks

LATVIAN.7853:

hmm
so warriors have the potential to kill alot faster while being abl to heal themselves too.
Guardians can absorb alot of damage but dont have that much dps

Well ill try make my decision thanks

The DPS gap isn’t as big as you’d think, but it’s still there.

The big gap is ranged DPS. Melee, guardians can keep up in sustained damage, but warrior has some massive openers (100 blades/Evis both mulch healthbars)

Guardian zone locking may not work well on champions, but champions as a whole need all the CC you can throw at them to get stunned anyway. Warrior has a few massive stuns usually, that only take off one point each. However, for encounters with groups, be it players, or anything else that isn’t CC immune, they can pull it into a nice tight ball for AoE death, then follow up with a hammer to keep them in the ball.

Guardian can be specced to passively grant a regen that stacks with normal regen to everyone around them. This is suprisingly potent in practice.

soo when it comes to killing bosses and champions which would be more effective?

LATVIAN.7853:

soo when it comes to killing bosses and champions which would be more effective?

Tossup again.

Neither have the CC to really control the boss.

Warrior can’t exactly mitigate the hits as well, but in skilled hands, can kite and dodge as well as melee. Their ability to apply alot of swiftness to themself lets them generally stay out of arms reach for alot longer, and attack when they have their survival tools up

Guardian can’t really range it as effectively, but their ability to effectively ignore hits come into play in melee, given champions shred you in a few hits, but don’t eat your defensive cooldowns much, if any faster. Focus offhand iirc gives you a shield that stops the next three attacks, letting you buy alot of time for your other cooldowns to come up again.

Warrior will kill it faster 1v1 though, but if you really want to 1v1 champs, I’d honestly suggest a mesmer. You can displace alot of aggro with clones, and generally run like hell without getting caught. Or abuse Blurred frenzy’s tiny cooldown. They suck against groups due to sub-par and backloaded AoE, but their 1v1 survival is beyond anything else.

Ye standing up and fighting champs isnt very smart and I doubt even a guardian will last without having to kite alot.

The thing that sways me a bit to warrior’s side is that guardians LACK ranged dps because not always are you going to be running into a fight meleeing.
However i LOVE the guardians survivability and ability to take damage.

LATVIAN.7853:

Ye standing up and fighting champs isnt very smart and I doubt even a guardian will last without having to kite alot.

The thing that sways me a bit to warrior’s side is that guardians LACK ranged dps because not always are you going to be running into a fight meleeing.
However i LOVE the guardians survivability and ability to take damage.

Scept is still there if you MUST engage at range, but yeah, honestly, if you want to be able to fight at a distance, you want a warrior.

but how important is range in PvE anyways? I mean warrior and guardian are not the kiting classes

Warrior rifle is actually quite good with single target. The downside is it has no AoE, none. Longbow is more of a condition damage weapon than a power weapon, so while you can swap, it won’t be that great.

Scepter is one of the stronger weapons for Guardians in theory; Smite has the highest potential damage, but generally fails to reach it because the target needs to be both stationary and large enough for all the fists to hit.

Ya neither of their weapons are very effective so idk about the guardians lack of range being an issue

Any of them truly you just got to be willing to build them that way. The thing is they all have a use in different ways.

We have so many guardians and warriors…bah try out the engineer on healing bombs/buffs, you can survive large groups of mobs as a guardian do, if you learn to play it. Have some fantasy guys , don’t let this become a “Clones War”.

I have both a fully geared 80 Warrior and fully geared 80 Guardian.

My comparison of the two classes is from a guy who has always played a tank class in trinity games. Even though Anet claims tanking isn’t available anymore in GW2, they’ve yet to prove this to me. I’ve been able to tank entire boss fights in Dungeons with both characters. And by tanking, I mean that I was able to keep just about all the major boss damage centered on me without any party member ever dying (dying, not downed, just no way to avoid a player to not stand in a fire field if he just does not want to move, or something).

My current ‘main’ is my 80 warrior, because it’s more challenging in dungeons. Guardians are honestly awesome, if only for the fact that together with Mesmers (who have it less available than Guardians), they are the only ones who can bring Aegis to the table. Many big bosses in this game do their big deadly attacks on a set timer and these attacks are slow.
Throwing up Aegis on the right moment means you can completely negate this one attack.
While playing my Guardian for a few weeks doing daily dungeon runs, I found that with the exception of few, I could mace and shield or mace and focus in the face of bosses all day long. Perhaps to the point where some bosses were so easy to react on, that I could watch a movie on my second screen and do just fine. (I’ve done this)
Even if there is no real tanking in this game, bosses apparently tend to favor fighting players that are right in their faces (namely, me). All damage that I take, is damage squishier players don’t have to take. Any damage spikes the group would’ve taken, that I negate through Aegis, is damage the squishier players again don’t have to take.
Now, I won’t say Guardian is boring or snooze-mode to play. You have to do a lot of situational support. Aegis only blocks one hit. Use it too early and block a weak attack and you don’t have the buff when the big one comes around. Waste your heals or shouts or consecrations at the wrong time and … They are exciting to play, but as soon as you master one, and know an instance through and through, you’ll end up where I am. Movie watching mode.

Thus enters the Warrior. Warriors are a completely different beast. You’re not actually grabbing attention from bosses. And if they do decide to face you head on, then warriors just don’t have the tools to mitigate the damage to a point where you can happily keep standing still and breeze through the fight.
Warrior tanking is more active. You’ll need to stay mobile, use shouts or banners to heal (depending on what’s traited and what you’re built for), use banners to auto revive one or more players, use shouts to become condition cleansing monsters, etc.
They have a bunch of blast finishers from for example the longbow 3 skill, as well as banner dropping. Blast finishers, in my opinion, are the best support moves in the game. I have a macro that auto-types for me ‘group up for healing’. If I have anything in the group that can put down a water field, I quickly go over the ‘group up for healing’ routine. I can usually (banner build) throw down 3 to 4 blast finishers in a short time, doing close to 5k of instant healing to everyone around me. Coupled with constant regen from my banners in play, I’m constantly keeping my team alive.
Aside from all this team support, Warriors actually have the role of one of the major damage dealers. This gives you a completely different perspective on playing tankish support with a warrior as opposed to a Guardian. With my Warrior, next to deciding when to support and how, I’m also constantly in a position over overthinking: ‘Okay, so I could stand back, res a few poeple, do a healing combo run now and get people buffed up and ready for action again. Or, I could actually go in, being bulky and all, kill one squishy enemy, hoping that my downed team mates rally on this mob, try to grab attention of the rest of the group, kite them around, kill them slowly and keep them busy, while another team mate does the cleric drill.’
It happens more than often that my method of tanking that I’m used to (other games, Guardian in GW2) is thrown overboard on the Warrior and I go in offensively and still aid my team (I can still use shouts if I don’t go to far away, my banner can still be thrown down near my allies when I know I won’t need the regen, etc.) immensily.

Honestly, between the two, it’s a completely different way of supporting the team. Both are tankish creatures, so I feel that player either warrior or guardian as a ranged healer or something along the lines is a waste. Elementalists are actually so much better team supporters in that sense. But if you make use of both their team support options as well as their ability to mitigate damage or otherwise keep players alive and inherent tankiness, it’s just a matter of defensive playstyle versus offensive playstyle.

two posts split 5001 characters bla bla bla.

Also, Ele’s and Rangers have the most on demand water combo fields. I can’t proc blast finishers for area healing if we don’t have more of these in the game. A support Ele will probably do better support than a Guardian and Warrior combined. A tank specced Ele may likely be able to take a beating longer than a Guardian and Warrior combined. So unless you’re dead set on heavy armor wearers, consider Ele as well.

I only play as a warrior and since my guild needed a ‘tanky’ person with them I went for that.
-28K hp, almost 3700 armor

-mace + shield (1,5 sec block+retaliate, interrupt, stun, 5sec block) and with endure pain I can basicly ignore anything but condition damage for 9,5 sec if I’m not mistaken.

-I can jump into packs of mobs and revive people faster than most classes.

-I can attack one mob, bull rush to another one and then shield bash even another one.

-I use my elite banner skill as healing and can switch between other banners (while not in combat) for more, almost 100 % of the time, healing for everyone nearby.

So in other words, speaking from my experience as a warrior, you CAN take on champions (with the correct amount of dodging etc) and elites or whatever.

I run a Turret Engineer, and it works pretty well – outside of dungeons, anyway.

Engineers have an absurd amount of healing abilities available with the use of a few traits (something like sixteen heals, both direct and regen, and three or four condition removals, with the use of one Grandmaster trait and one Adept trait) if you want to go Support-type, are capable of hilarious amounts of control (properly timed, I can keep an enemy immobilized for ten or more seconds, bouncing between my rifle, net turret toolbelt, net turret, and Supply Kit, and then there’s the various knockback abilities available with Gadgets), and also have access to some interesting effects from Elixirs (one of them is an AoE res-over-time when thrown, and that’s one of the more reliable ones – the others range from a potion that gives either stealth or stability, one of a small variety of buffs, one that turns all conditions into boons, one that puts up one of three indirect-effect combo field effects).

As a Turret Engineer, I find myself mostly contributing to combat by keeping the attention of the hard-to-kill enemies for a long period of time, often kiting them back and forth through my turret field (if the game had voice-chat, I’d be going “HELP HELP GET HIM OFF ME HELP,” but still), thanks to the inordinate amount of aggro I receive. I can also solo some of the more difficult bits simply through number of damage/control sources. Don’t have that frantic “Oh god which kit which kit” feel I imagine the Kit Engineers having at first, either, which is nice.

Edit: Also, if Champions are any metric: I’ve solo’d Champion Jungle Trolls, two-manned a Champion Ice Wurm, and three-manned a Champion Frost Troll – it just took a lot of kiting in the case of the Trolls, and getting out of the way of the Wurm’s boulders.